Commerce Weekly: You can now buy stuff with tweets

AmEx now lets you buy with hashtags, 3D printing threats to retail, and PayPal comes to the gas pump.

American Express turns Twitter into an ecommerce platform

American Express announced an enhancement this week to its Sync with Twitter feature — users can now buy things with a tweet. Tricia Duryee reports at All Things Digital that all users will need to register to participate, even previous users of the sync feature, in order to provide a delivery address for purchased items. Once registration is complete, Duryee says, the purchasing process is pretty straightforward:

“For instance, participants will be able to buy a $25 American Express Gift Card for $15 … by tweeting #BuyAmexGiftCard25. American Express will reply via Twitter, asking the user to confirm the purchase in a tweet. All products will be shipped via free two-day shipping.”

Duryee reports that more items have been added since the launch and deals will be offered for three-week periods.

American Express SVP of digital partnerships and development Leslie Berland told Duryee that Twitter is just the beginning — the service will eventually be offered on other platforms, such as Facebook.

While fun and novel for consumers, Forbes’ B. Bonin Bough notes the value of the ecommerce partnership for participating retailers: “Having customers promote brands while buying them is a win-win situation,” he said, “and could potentially lead to incredible results — that is, if AmEx and Twitter can get this new purchasing behavior to catch on with consumers.”

Purchasing behavior may not end up being the ultimate obstacle, however. Angel Djambazov at GeekWire took a look at the potential security issues of the program, noting that “security has never been Twitter’s strong point. The platform is rife with phishing.”

Could 3D printing bring down retail?

The ForeSee Mobile Satisfaction Index: Holiday Retail Edition was released this week. The survey of more than 6,200 shoppers reviewed the consumer experience during the 2012 holiday shopping season.

One of the highlights of the report addressed the trend of showrooming. Eric Feinberg, senior director of mobile at ForeSee and co-author of the report, said for the press release, “Customers are using their mobile phones as integrated parts of their shopping experience … Mobile is the ultimate companion channel, making showrooming as much of an opportunity as it is a threat.”

“The idea that everyone is going to be looking at Amazon’s app when they are in Target and Walmart is proving out not to be true, and I think retailers need to continue to focus on providing a great integrated experience between that phone and that retail environment so that there is a value add for a consumer when they are in Target to go to Target’s app or site instead of going to Amazon’s.”

Fretting over showrooming may be a bit shortsighted on the part of retailers, however — the real concern for the future of retail may have more to do with 3D printing. Dalton Caldwell took a look this week at a recent statement by Marc Andreessen that the chain retail model is “a fundamentally implausible economic structure,” arguing that few stores “can survive a decline of 20 to 30 percent in revenues.”

Caldwell says he isn’t sure he agrees with Andreessen’s prediction, but that “[i]f we accept Andreessen’s argument that most retail companies could be put out of business by a 20-30% decline in revenue, 3D printing could be plausibly be the vector by which this scenario is manifested.” He points to items such as toys and sports equipment, and home improvement items such as plastic drywall anchors.

Not everything can or will be replaced by 3D printing, Caldwell notes, but taking the things that can into consideration along with retail stores’ “revenue sensitivity caused by debt” might just lead the future Andreessen predicts. You can read Caldwell’s full piece on his personal blog.

Sarah Perez at TechCrunch notes the impact of the Gilbarco deal, reporting that “the 150-year old Gilbarco currently works with 19 of the top 20 convenience store operators in the U.S.” and that company “has installed over 30,000 POS systems across North America which will now see PayPal integrations.”

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AMEX and Twitter. Any more proof needed that twitter is aspiring to be a closed silo BIG Media company that has a primary goal of extracting as much value/revenue from the Community as possible.

Any chance some one could ask Twitter or AMEX to share the details of their partnership with the Community that gives them value ?

Have any other third payment providers been given the same access to integrate into twitter or is this an exclusive to AMEX ?

On the revenue side of things what is twitter receiving and how much is AMEX paying for what seems like exclusive to access the twitter community ?

In my view the entire process should be transparent so that the twitter community can understand if twitter has made the best decision for them

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